Brian Dolzani launches tour with Acoustic Cafe gig

Published 11:37 am, Friday, May 15, 2015

Like everyone else, the 20-year-old Brian Dolzani thought he would be over the hill when he turned 30.

The singer-songwriter is 40 now and chuckles as he remembers his younger, callow self.

Dolzani has come to see the value of experience and continuing to find new ways of looking at life in his music.

The Fairfield native has a new, recorded-in-Nashville CD just out -- "If I Don't Speak a Word" -- and is starting a national tour on Thursday, March 28, at the Acoustic Cafe in Bridgeport. (The tour will bring him full circle in May with a final gig at Cafe Nine in New Haven.)

"I've been writing a long time and putting a lot of work into it. I think this (CD) is a big leap," Dolzani said in a recent interview.

"I like to think of myself as an experienced truth teller," he added, with a chuckle. "I've gotten more specific and more personal."

The songs chart what the performer sees as the second "coming of age" most of us go through as we hit those scary milestone ages of 30 and 40.

One of the most moving songs on the album, "Hey Dad," is Dolzani's self-described "letter to a deceased father" in which he looks back at what he lost when his dad died 25 years ago.

The new album includes tunes written by Dolzani over the past two years. What he intended as an EP quickly expanded to a full CD after he began recording in Nashville.

"I did five or six songs (in the studio) and loved it and just wanted to keep going," he said of the burst of creativity that followed the first recording sessions.

Dolzani said the work in Nashville pushed him to focus more on his vocal work than he has in the past.

"We did it in a very intimate, bare-bones style," he said of his own attempt to get away from today's often synthetic, over-produced style of music recording.

"It's almost scary," he said of the predominant contemporary pop sound. "They've created a whole new reality."

Live performance values can wind up taking a back seat to technology when songs are introduced with such studio bombast: "The expectations that are set up force artists to try to sound like the album," he said.

Dolzani said that when he is writing new songs he doesn't start out trying to second guess how they might sound to an audience. He is a believer in the notion that the more specific artists can get in their work, the more universal their impact will be.

"I hope that my style gives listeners the feeling of hearing a true story or even of reading a novel," he said.

"If you start out wondering what everyone else thinks you end up not connecting with anyone," the performer added.

While Dolzani sometimes wishes the music business was still as formally structured as it was in the 1970s and 1980s -- with record companies signing and supporting artists -- there is a lot to be said for the freedom and control individual artists have in this new age.

"It's tough because so many people are doing it now," he said of the way that DIY technology and the Internet have allowed anyone to put their work in front of the public. "Sometimes it can feel like it's not about the work and the craft, but about how many Facebook friends you have.

"It's tough to navigate," he said of today's music scene. "But I do like the freedom of no one saying, `No, you can't do that.' "